A federal bill that will Prime Minister Mark Carney says will help the country build big projects quickly passed both the House of Commons and the Senate, but not without drawing criticisms from local Conservative MPs.
Peace River – Westlock MP Arnold Viersen and Lakeland MP Shannon Stubbs both said Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, wasn’t enough to address what they say are 10 years of bad policy from the Liberal government.
“It’s always half measures. Over the last decade the Liberals have put in all these road blocks — C-69, C-48, 30 by 30, the carbon tax — and now they want to put a door in the wall without getting rid of the all the barriers,” said Viersen in a June 17 interview.
Viersen, Stubbs and the rest of the Conservative caucus voted in favour of the bill, which passed third reading in the House on June 20. The Senate confirmed the bill without amendments on June 26.
Once it is in effect, the two-part bill will allow the government to move select projects that are deemed to be in the national interest through regulatory processes quicker, a priority Prime Minister Carney campaigned on.
“This allows cabinet to pick a project and give them an exemption, and it’s only in place for five years," said Viersen. "So it’s an admission that we can’t get anything built in this country and we need an exemption to the existing regime, but we’re saying we got to overhaul the existing regime. We can’t just give it exemptions,” he said.
Despite voting in favour of the bill, Viersen said the government needs to actually address other legislation that he and his party say are killing the Canadian economy, including Bill C-69, known as the Impact Assessment Bill, Bill C-48, which bans oil tankers from B.C.'s northern coast, and the carbon tax.
While the Conservative Party did lend its support to the bill in the House, the party was able to amend parts of the bill to reduce the amount of legislation the government would be able to ignore. In her role as the Shadow Minister for Natural Resources, Stubbs was a very vocal component of the opposition.
The amendment bars the government from bypassing 15 pieces of legislation, including the Indian Act, the Criminal Code of Canada, and the Elections Act.
“After a lost Liberal decade of bloated bureaucracy and stagnant wages, Canadians want new projects that will bring good jobs for our workers. But that can’t mean dodging critical legislation that protects taxpayers from corrupt politicians,” said Stubbs in a June 19 release.
“Under the original Liberal proposal, projects could have been approved and built that would financially benefit members of the Cabinet,” said Stubbs.
“Instead of sneaking in provisions that would give themselves the power to broadly skirt the laws of the land without consequences, they should repeal the bad policies that block projects like the oil and gas cap, industrial carbon tax, C-69 and C-48.”
Stubbs was unavailable for an interview before publication.
While the bill has the potential to have a large impact on the local region, Viersen said it will be reliant on the government to turn it into actual projects.
“I hope the government is able to generate interest from industry to build some of these projects. We need pipelines going to the west coast, we need pipelines going to the east coast, we need pipelines going to Churchill, MB,” he said.
